Ferris Bueller's Day Off turned 40 this year. The Sunday Times marked the occasion with a reunion interview featuring the cast. Mia Sara, who played Sloane Peterson, Ferris's girlfriend, the girl in the leopard-print coat watching the parade from the float, one of the most iconic supporting characters in 1980s teen comedy, agreed to do it despite her usual reluctance to discuss the film. She explained why she is usually reluctant.
"I don't really give interviews because making Ferris Bueller was not that good an experience for me," Sara told the paper in an interview published June 21. "But I'm very aware of what a precious thing this movie is, and I don't want to disappoint people. But I didn't get along well with John."
John is John Hughes, the director who wrote and directed Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science and Ferris Bueller's Day Off in a four-year run of the 1980s that made him arguably the most important filmmaker of the American teenage experience.
He died in 2009 at 59. Sara, who is 59 now herself, described him as "a strange guy" and was specific about the friction.
"He wanted us all to hang out together and to introduce us to the French New Wave films," she said. "But the others were seasoned actors and I was a snotty New York kid and had seen all those movies, so he was frustrated in that desire."
She was 17 when she was cast. Matthew Broderick, who played Ferris, was 23. Alan Ruck, who played Cameron, was 29. Jennifer Grey, who played Ferris's sister Jeanie, was 25.
Sara was four years younger than the youngest of her co-stars and twelve years younger than Ruck, in her first major Hollywood production, working with a director whose specific vision for how his ensemble would bond was exactly the wrong approach for where she was in her life. She acknowledged her own part in it.
"I didn't have the emotional maturity to deal with other people's egos, or my own."
The Crush That Was Going Nowhere
The specific romantic subplot of the Ferris Bueller production that Sara revealed in the Sunday Times interview is the detail that spread most quickly once the interview began circulating.
She had a significant crush on Matthew Broderick during filming. It was, as she put it, "very much unrequited." She found out why.
While Sara was developing feelings for the leading man, Broderick was secretly dating Jennifer Grey, the actress who played his character's sister in the film. Grey confirmed the relationship in the same Sunday Times reunion, it began "shortly after filming started" and lasted about two years. Neither she nor Broderick made it obvious.
"It was not easy to keep hidden on set," Grey said, describing one scene where she got the giggles so badly from the way Broderick looked at her that she had to bite her cheek and eventually was sent to walk around the block.
Sara, aware of none of this at the time, described the experience simply. "Yeah, I had no chance!"
Broderick has been married to Sarah Jessica Parker since 1997. Grey and Broderick's relationship ended before anyone went public with it.
The Career That Never Felt Right And The Life She Built Instead
The honesty with which Sara discussed the Ferris Bueller experience extends to how she described her career more broadly.
She has not been absent from acting entirely, she appeared in The Life of Chuck in 2024, the Mike Flanagan-directed Stephen King adaptation, returning to screens after a long hiatus, but her website biography says what most of her interviews do not bother to:
"Mia Sara used to be an actress, but recovered her senses and now she writes."
"I never really had the resilience to deal with the audition process," she told the Sunday Times. "There are some things in my career that I'm really proud of, but overall it was not a happy career for me."
She appeared in Timecop with Jean-Claude Van Damme, Apprentice to Murder, Daughter of Darkness, and various other films and television productions in the years after Ferris Bueller.
She was married to Jason Connery, Sean Connery's son, from 1996 to 2002. She has been married to Brian Henson, Jim Henson's son, and the director of The Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island, since 2010.
They live in Suffolk, England. She writes poetry. She occasionally acts.
Her children, she mentioned, have found their own relationship with the movie she made when she was 17. "My kids say they can see the moment their friends make the connection between me and the movie, and they'll say, 'Wow, your mom was hot!'"
The One Part She Loved
The interview was not uniformly bleak in its look backward. Sara remembered one specific part of making Ferris Bueller that she described without reservation as genuinely fun.
The parade scene, the Twist and Shout sequence in downtown Chicago where Ferris commandeers a float during the Von Steuben Day parade and the whole city dances, was filmed in pieces across multiple locations, with the cast being driven in vans between setups so the camera could catch them from different angles.
"I had so much fun doing that parade scene," she said. "That was so crazy. Because we would do the dance and then we'd get in a van and they'd drive us blocks away, and the camera would go, and then we'd do the dance again and wait for Matthew to pass. And so it was just this crazy let's catch it as many times as we can. So that was a great moment."
The parade scene is one of the most beloved sequences in the film. Life does move pretty fast.